" "
skip navigationEarning your spot on a college team will be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life. Walking on is very challenging, but when it works out there is nothing better.
Being considered a walk-on is far more common in college sports than most families and athletes realize.
According to the latest NCAA information, 46 percent of Division I athletes are walk-ons and 39 percent of Division II athletes are walk-ons. Division III athletes are not eligible to receive athletic scholarships, so walk-on status is not calculated.
Here are the five most commonly asked questions about being a college walk-on:
Being a college walk-on simply means you are on the college team and receive no form of athletic financial aid (athletic scholarship). Most people assume a walk-on is someone who wasn’t recruited, and they got on the team by making it into the school on their own and making it through a grueling tryout process.
There are walk-on athletes who have this experience, but there are also highly-recruited walk-ons who may have even turned down scholarship offers from other schools.
There are no hard numbers on athletes who went from being a walk-on to receiving an athletic scholarship. That said, it is far more common that a walk-on athlete eventually gets some amount of an athletic scholarship if they are on the team for multiple years. But don’t expect your scholarships to be a full-ride — most are partial scholarships.
Read more: What are the different types of offers I could get?
There are many different classifications of walk-ons:
Given the wide range of walk-on statuses, and the fact each program uses walk-ons differently, there is no single way to best describe it. But here are a few common experiences that might give you a better idea:
It depends! If you are an athlete who is used to being a starter and getting a lot of playing time, the transition to being a walk-on can be very difficult.
However, if you want to play at the highest level you can and have the character and work ethic needed to make it as a college walk-on, it could just be the perfect fit for you.
NCSA is the world's largest and most successful collegiate athletic recruiting network. A wholly owned subsidiary of Reigning Champs LLC, NCSA's 700 teammates leverage exclusive data, proprietary matching algorithms and personal relationships built over nearly two decades as the industry leader to connect tens of thousands of college-bound student-athletes to more than 35,000 college coaches nationwide across 34 sports every year.